I worked for a university IT department as a student worker for a little over four years. We had a sister department, the media center, which loaned out laptops, projectors, and other technology to professors as needed.
In my fourth year of employment, in 2005, I was on a first-name basis with nearly all the employees of the university, including the head of the media center.
[Media Center Head] was the queen of her kingdom and had quite a few obnoxious rules in place, but the most important was an iron-clad employee ID policy for checking out laptops. Under normal circumstances, I completely agree with this policy; however, this wasn’t a normal circumstance.
We got a call from [Media Center Head] at 4:40 on a Friday. (We closed at 5:00.) A laptop she was trying to loan out to a very important professor wasn’t able to log into the network, and she requested that we come to look at it. Sure thing.
I made the ten-minute walk across campus from our office to the media center with my tool kit. When I got there, I saw the professor and [Media Center Head] and asked to see the laptop.
Media Center Head: “Wait, [My Name], you need your name badge. Where is it?”
My mind flashed to my name badge, clipped to my jacket, hanging on a coat rack in the IT office.
Me: “Ah, it’s on my jacket, [Media Center Head]. I forgot to grab it rushing over here.”
I chuckled a bit.
Media Center Head: *Deadpan* “[My Name], you can’t work on this until you go get your badge.”
Me: “[Media Center Head], I thought this was an emergency. Do you need me to fix this right now?”
Media Center Head: “Yes, of course, but we still need to always follow policy.”
Me: “Fair enough. Policy is incredibly important. I’ll go get my name badge.”
I left the office and trekked the ten minutes back to my office. Then, I picked up the phone and called her.
Me: “Hey, [Media Center Head], just letting you know that because it’s 5:20 and policy states that student workers can’t work after hours, I’ll have to come back Monday. Have a great weekend!”
She fumed at me for a few minutes until I essentially hung up on her.
It was my fault that I had forgotten my badge, but policy is very important, and it was [Media Center Head]’s prerogative to decide that the badge policy was too important for her to overlook my mistake. And it was mine to overlook the “student workers cannot be paid overtime” rule.
[Media Center Head] was not in the office when I went to work on it Monday morning, but the laptop was fixed within forty-five business minutes of her reporting the problem to our office, which is relatively fast.